Just as Mr. Somerled was thanking the officer (I soon found out that he was a lieutenant, named Donald Douglas) I heard other voices behind me. "Good gracious!" I had just time to think, "it's Mrs. West and Mr. Norman," when they came round a screen of masonry, and were upon us. As soon as they saw who we were they stopped, Mrs. West pale, with the same martyred expression, which grew sweeter and sadder every instant. Mr. Norman shook hands with us in a cordial but embarrassed way, and the man who had refused to let us enter at first would have headed the newcomers off, but Mr. Douglas stopped him.
"The Castle isn't open for visitors to-day," he said, "but I am making an exception of Mr. Somerled's party, and as you are friends of his I shall be delighted to include you."
"You're very kind indeed; but——" Mr. Norman had to begin answering because his sister didn't speak, and only looked, looked, looked at "her friend Mr. Somerled." Her brother awaited a cue until the pause grew embarrassing, and then the Knight sprang to the rescue of another lady in distress.
"We shall be delighted too, Mrs. West," he said.
That was probably what she wanted, for she beamed on the Soldier Man (my Soldier Man), and accepted his kindness. Mr. Douglas then put himself by my side; and Mrs. West annexed Mr. Somerled, or he annexed her. This left Mrs. James for Mr. Norman, and they hadn't been introduced: but they began chatting at once.
Mr. Douglas seemed quite interested when I told him he was the first soldier I'd ever known outside a book. He asked me if I thought I should like soldiers, and I said yes.
Into the heart of the fortress he led us: into the keep, square, ponderous, forbidding, cool even on a hot August day, and the best part left now of the proud old fortress.
Mrs. West had a notebook, a little purple and gold one, like a doubled-over pansy. As Mr. Douglas (laughing at himself because he was not experienced as a guide) rattled off all the information he could remember about Roman foundations—a sack by the Danes; William the Conqueror, and William Rufus, and a British fort older than the time of the Romans—she would scribble bits down hastily. But Mr. Norman took no notes, and when he saw her writing, he looked sad, almost guilty.
"Did you say the round wall the Britons built is under the keep?" she asked Mr. Douglas, who is, I feel, the kind of young man you would be calling "Donald" before you knew what you were doing. "Are there only three fortresses like this in all England? Do tell me what makes this unique?" And she looked at him so prettily that if I'd been in his place I'd have run to her like a dog and fawned at her feet. But he never stirred, and simply answered across the other people, though she is so much more intelligent than I—I, who couldn't describe properly what is a bastion.
Our guide lit a candle for the dark dungeons, awful places with grooves worn in the stone floors by the dragging feet of the prisoners, who paced rhythmically up and down in the tether of their chains. On the walls, covered with a cold sweat, as of deathless agony, we could see the staples; and there was one spot of a dreadful fascination, where Donald Douglas held his candle to show a trail of slimy moisture. Always this weeping stone had been there, he said, no one knew why; and in old days, when these dungeons bore the name of the "black hell," prisoners tortured with thirst used, animal-like, to lick the oozing patch, making many hollows round it like miniature glacier mills. After Culloden one hundred and eighty men were thrown in during one night, and only fifty were alive in the morning.